Astro

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Astro is an open source JavaScript-based static site generator and front end framework used by several people in the IndieWeb community to run their personal sites.

Originally built to be a more performant and web-focused alternative to popular SSG frameworks like Gatsby, Next.js, and Nuxt, Astro has always tried to minimise the amount of JavaScript that is actually sent to the browser. In more recent major version releases, this has increasingly taken the form of server-side JavaScript rendering, focusing on concepts like HTML streaming and the "islands architecture" method of hydration, both of which aim to send as much of a page as HTML as possible, before injecting dynamic content using JavaScript, if it is available.

Astro is also designed with code migration in mind, allowing you to use almost any other front-end framework or templating language, and then fully converting the output to server-rendered HTML and vanilla JavaScript wherever possible.

By default, it expects you to use the `.astro` templating format/language, which is based on JSX but removes any differences between web attributes/APIs and that format (for instance, Astro require you to use HTML attributes like `for` directly, rather than the more common JSX `htmlFor` attribute). However, you can also integrate other front-end frameworks, including React, Vue, Svelte, Preact, and HTMX, using "adaptors".

This focus on working "with the grain of the web" has allowed Astro to adopt web-native technologies like the View Transitions API very early, falling back to polyfills for browsers that do not yet support it yet.

There is an active community Discord and robust documentation; docs are built using their Starlight kit, a documentation-specific starter pack and plugin set built on top of the Astro framework. There are also a number of migration guides for other front end frameworks.

As of January 2026 it was announced that the Astro project would be acquired and managed by Cloudflare: Astro is Joining Cloudflare

Getting Started

The Astro team maintain a getting started guide, alongside a number of migration guides and themes/starter packs.

Building Blocks

(See other static site generators for basic principles)

• Steve Frenzel has documented webmention integration:
  • Webmentions in Astro Blog Posts
• Murray has documented how they are running Astro on a generic cPanel web host with Node.js
  • Launching Astro from cPanel
  • Updating Astro from cPanel

IndieWeb Examples

• Jarema uses Github, Astro and Vercel for his personal website.
• Murray uses Astro on theadhocracy.co.uk, as well as several microsites e.g. their music collection, with a mixture of SSG and SSR rendering. Currently hosted on Krystal using Node.js (see above)
• Al Abut uses GitHub, Astro and Netlify for his site (alabut.com) since late 2023. The main draw was the fast “no javascript by default” performance and gorgeous beginner-friendly documentation, whereas the drawbacks that emerged over time were the lack of robust RSS support and complete absence of template inheritance in favor of component encapsulation instead.
• Lesley Lai uses Astro for his site lesleylai.info since 2024. He also uses it for Graphics Programming Virtual Meetup website. The main attractive feature to him is the flexible content-collections feature
• Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

See Also

• static site generator
• Eleventy
• Why Astro over Next.js in 2025: documents why shipping less JavaScript is better for everyone
• EmDash a CMS from CloudFlare which claims that it takes the ideas that made WordPress dominant -- extensibility, admin UX, a plugin ecosystem -- and rebuilds them on serverless, type-safe foundations [1]